What makes a hard drive ‘hard’?

Question

Why would it be described like that? It’s not like SSDs or optical media are particularly soft.

In: Technology

Answer 1

It’s to differentiate it from a floppy disc, which were the removable/portable storage medium of the time that hard drives first became common. The earliest ones from the 70’s/80’s were literally floppy because they were flimsy plastic. In the late 80’s/early 90’s, there was the rise of the smaller, rigid plastic discs. And then those faded away for CD-Rom and USB flash drives, internet file sharing, etc.